Study for Ocean Racer & Ocean Racer, 1975

Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto Collection of the artist Acquired directly from the artist by the present Private Collector, Newfoundland & Labrador

“Christopher Pratt: A Retrospective”, Vancouver Art Gallery, November 23 – January 26, 1985 (also shown at The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Memorial University Gallery, St. John’s; and Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax)

David P. Silcox & Meriké Weiler, “Christopher Pratt”, Scarborough, Ontario, 1982, Study for Ocean Racer reproduced page 118 Joyce Zemans, “Christopher Pratt: A Retrospective” [exhibition catalogue], Vancouver Art Gallery, 1985, “Study for Ocean Racer” reproduced page 62 and on the front cover

Christopher Pratt has always believed that there is an immense presence in ordinariness. He depicted his everyday surroundings in the Maritimes, often in a reductive or magnified view. In “Ocean Racer”, Pratt has zoomed in on the geometric, nearly abstract quality of a sail, mast and ropes of a racing sailboat. Executed in muted greys and blues, the composition is calming and timeless. Discussing “Ocean Racer” in the 1985 Christopher Pratt retrospective catalogue, Joyce Zemans speaks to the artist’s compositional progress from his studies to the silkscreen noting that Pratt’s process of working from “...abstracted collages rather than from a photograph or drawing based on real life, Pratt finds in the relationships of angles, planes, and colours, a design that captures not a fleeting moment but his experience of sailing. He comprehends the special power of every line and the importance of its placement in the composition. And like Georgia O’Keefe, he understands the artist’s task ‘to fill a space beautifully’.”